Long Running Transactions Within Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

Recently, one of the major problems in various countries is the management of complicated organisations to cope with the increasingly competitive marketplace. This problem can be solved using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems which can offer an integrated view of the whole business process within an organisation in real-time. However, those systems have complicated workflow, are costly to be analysed to manage the whole business process in those systems. Thus, Long Running Transaction (LRTs) models have been proposed as optimal solutions, which can be used to simplify the analysis of ERP systems workflow to manage the whole organiational process and ensure that completed transactions in a business process are not processed in any other process. Practically, LRTs models have various problems, such as the rollback and check-pointing activities. This led to the use of Communication Closed Layers (CCLs) for decomposing processes into layers to be analysed easily using sequential programs. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to develop an advanced approach to implement and analyse the workflow of an organisation in order to deal with failures in Long Running Transaction (LRTs) within Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems using Communication Closed Layers (CCLs). Furthermore, it aims to examine the possible enhancements for the available methodology for ERP systems based on studying the LRT suitability and applicability to model the ERP workflows and offer simple and elegant constructs for implementing those complex and expensive ERP workflow systems. The implemented model in this thesis offers a solution for two main challenges; incompatibilities that result from the application of transitional transaction processing concepts to the ERP context and the complexity of ERP workflow. The first challenge is addressed based on offering new semantics to allow modelling of concepts, such as rollbacks and check-points through various constraints, while the second is addressed through the use of the Communication Closed Layer (CCL) approach. The implemented computational reconfigurable model of an ERP workflow system in this work is able to simulate real ERP workflow systems and allows obtaining more understanding of the use of ERP system in enterprise environments. Moreover, a case study is introduced to evaluate the application of the implemented model using three scenarios. The conducted evaluation stage explores the effectiveness of executable ERP computational models and offers a simple methodology that can be used to build those systems using novel approaches. Based on comparing the current model with two previous models, it can be concluded that the new model outperforms previous models based on benefiting from their features and solving their limitations which make them inappropriate to be used in the context of ERP workflow models

Seduction is Not Yet Betrayal: Trust and the Essence of Truth for Heidegger and Freud

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey BloechlThis project takes up the old question of the nature of truth by seeking to say, at one stroke, both what enables truth and falsity and what lets them matter to us so centrally. Somehow, we as human beings are fundamentally connected to a world in which the truth of statements and the genuineness of things can matter to us deeply and coherently. And yet, I try to show, this coherent unity between being and thinking can also be radically (if not always permanently) broken in the experience of psychosis. I argue that the source of that vulnerable unity must be a contingent event in which I find myself disposed trustingly toward the world, and therein find the world disclosed as trustworthy. Such primitive trust is phenomenally related to trusting a person, and Freudian psychoanalysis shows us that it develops psychologically through relation to a person. As what fundamentally structures self and world, however, this kind of attunement transcends psychology. Our very access to the being of things, i.e., to their compelling importance and organized significance, depends upon it. Thus, I support Martin Heidegger's account of the essence of truth as what first makes accessible the comparisons (between word and thing, for example) on which more traditional theories of truth are based. Yet I also confront Heidegger's phenomenological version of trust by highlighting what is at stake ontologically in our interpersonal psychic development, which psychoanalysis reveals to take place by way of seduction. Heidegger assumes that being must show itself, even if in a concealed way, and thus always takes absence as withdrawal or absencing, rather than as a radical break. By attending to the meaningful phenomena of psychosis, I defend the thesis that our relation to the world is instead opened up and sustained by a fundamental affective attunement (trust) that can dramatically fail. In other words, I try to show that we are exposed to a more radical kind of concealment than Heidegger's thinking of truth seems able to do justice to, a failure of being that can thoroughly overwhelm us.Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Philosophy